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Coding challenge goes wrong: creator refuses to pay $5000 prize money
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Coding challenge goes wrong: creator refuses to pay $5000 prize money

Ellsworth Toohey
Jan 14, 2025
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Coding challenge goes wrong: creator refuses to pay $5000 prize money
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Southern chivalry - argument versus clubs, 1856, by John L. Magee, Public Domain

When Mike Goldman offered $5,000 to anyone who could compress a randomly-generated file of their chosen size in early 2001, he thought his money was perfectly safe. After all, it's mathematically impossible to compress truly random data. But Patrick Craig spotted a loophole …

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